like when one's ears are filled with silent pausing,that’s the effect it has, this craft you own.

I’m reading—no, revering, I should say—

this form of nothing, with a smile recalling

what luck was mine those thirty years ago.

10 April 1987

Translator's Note: On
the genesis of this poem, and its original text, see the final sections of Борис Мессерер, «Промельк Беллы», at http://magazines.russ.ru/znamia/2011/12/me10. Loseff invited his exact contemporary Bella Akhmadulina (1937-2010) to read at Dartmouth College in April 1987. Messerer wrongly gives the year as 1997, and persistently refers to Dartmouth as 'Dortmund'. In Auden’s
famous poem ‘In Memory of W.B.Yeats’ there is no ‘but’ before ‘it survives’.